Nonetheless, the costs of disseminating one’s best work on an SDG are considerable.Academic success demands that scholars make contributions to the body of knowledge intheir research area. However, electronic outlets like SDGs provide little basis upon which tovalidate this success. SDGs have not been in existence long enough to instill confidence intheir institutional permanence. This is further complicated by ambiguous copyright law andcitation conventions, making the establishment of one’s claim to original ideas unclear.Unlike electronic journals, it is still unclear how institutional rewards will be distributed forthe kind of collaborative electronic scholarship takes place in ListServ-based communities.Unless lists gain more of a scholarly legitimacy, it is likely that little of traditional academicvalue, or that which can compete with the more traditional forms of scholarly production

In commenting on the development of H-Net, a consortium of close to 100 scholarlydiscussion groups with a collective membership of over 50,000 participants, Peter Knupfer,the organization’s associate director explained the value of the SDG.Knupfer (1996)notedthat SDGs have brought the information revolution to the desktops of working scholarsaround the world. SDGs have not only increased the opportunities for scholars to conversewith each other, they have pried open previously restricted fields of editing and informationmanagement. Through SDGs, the Internet is best exploited as a collective enterprise byacademics and teachers who mediate an environment many regard as forbidding and hostile.As an example of this power, H-Net is particularly illustrative of how an internationalconsortium of scholars can use these electronic networks to advance humanities and socialscience teaching and research

When the moderator takes an active role, the rates ofparticipation and user satisfaction are significantly higher

Online scholarly collaboration needs to be carefully designed, and SDGs are most useful asa collaborative medium if the group has a specific task to accomplish, a deadline to meet, anda shared cultural or knowledge base

Commentator Kat Nagel outlined a life cycle that every list seems to go through. First thereis initial enthusiasm and evangelism (where people complain about the infrequency ofpostings). This is followed by a period of growth and then community (with lots of threadsand information and willingness to help). When the number of messages increases both involume and in diversity, a certain discomfort arises (often marked by complaints that the listhas lost its central purpose). Finally, if a group of purists emerges and is allowed to ‘‘flame’’(attack ad hominem) and act self-righteously, while others leave to form groups of their own,then a complacency develops, or worse stagnation and death. If, however, the self-righteousare minimized and a balance develops between community and diversity, then a list will reachmaturity

One 1997 study found that scholars who self-select as participants inscholarly discussion groups can spend over 40% of their office hours working on the Internet,and the most popular professional uses of the Internet revolve around sending and receivingelectronic mail, both personal and list-mediated

The depth of interactivity varies widely among discussion groups. Some groups are likecocktail parties with many conversations (threads) competing. Some, like formal seminars,focus around specific topics. Some are like notice boards in the local grocery store wheremessages are pinned and left for others to read and comment on. And some groups merelyfunction as newspapers, disseminating electronic journals or computer programs, advertisingconferences or job vacancies. Many people are content to just read and listen, even in themost interactive groups, while a relatively few dominate conversations

One of the earliest nonscience scholarly uses of this technology was the listHumanist,

McCarty saw a kind of electronic seminar, whosepurpose was ‘‘not so much to convey facts as to further understanding of its subject, to trainthe minds of its participants, and so to help create a community of scholars.’’

In some ways, the exchange of correspondence publicly over these networksconstitutes a new form of publication. The posting on a list frequently resembles a letter to theeditor where someone conveys their opinions on a subjec